Physichromies and Chromosaturations – experiments in pure colour

Associated media

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Colour in Space and Time

Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea (eds)

Few outside certain areas of Latin America will have heard of Carlos Cruz-Diez.  Even in Houston, home of the Cruz-Diez Foundation and where, just this afternoon, I circumnavigated a colourful and sinuous Cruz-Diez sculpture perhaps 50 feet long at the University of Houston, it is doubtful that one per cent of the population knows of him or his work.

Who is Carlos Cruz-Diez, and what has he achieved?  He is an 87-year-old artist born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela.  He attended the opening of the exhibition covered by this catalogue, and enjoyed a vibrant and eloquent conversation with curator, Mari Carmen Ramírez. He claimed to have studied art history from black-and-white illustrations, leading him to wonder what was ‘the big deal’ with Velazquez and the other artists.  When he visited the Prado in the mid-1950s, he understood and was astonished. 

His paintings from the 1940s and 1950s begin the catalogue, as they did the exhibition.  Displaying elements of realism, Surrealism, Cubism, geometric abstraction, and the art of illustration, they also foreshadow the experiments in pure colour interactions for which he is best known.  From 1960 on, Paris and Caracas have been the cities closest to his heart and work. 

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Timeis the catalogue of an exhibition of the same name that was organized by and held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 6 February  to 4 July 2011.   The late MFAH director Peter Marzio described this as ‘the first large-scale retrospective dedicated to this Franco-Venezuelan master’.  It is a good bet that the guiding force behind the exhibition was Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the MFAH.  She credits the compilation and editing of the catalogue to ‘a titanic team effort’.  Undoubtedly that was true of the impressive exhibition as well.  Recent essays by Ramírez (‘The Issue at Stake is Color’) and co-editor Héctor Olea (‘The Dialectics of Chrono-Chromatic Space’) as well as historical documents by Frank Popper (1954 and 1970), Jean Clay (1969) and Alfredo Boulton (1975) represent the scholarly and sometimes jargon-heavy element of the book.  But there is poetry to be found here, too. 

When I first entered the exhibition I wondered how these experiments in pure colour, which changed every instant as I walked past or through them, could be adequately represented in a catalogue.  There is no substitute for actually walking past a Physichromie, which achieves its effects through the careful placement in close proximity of hundreds of low relief, differently coloured panels.  Similarly, no book could recreate the feel of walking through a Chromosaturation, whose effects are achieved by the interaction of different colours of light in space, and may remind some of Dan Flavin’s environments incorporating coloured fluorescent bulbs.  (Cruz-Diez discounts similarities between his work and that of Flavin, James Turrell, and other artists using light as a medium.)  The catalogue does a beautiful job, displaying the Physichromies and other series at multiple angles to reveal a cross-section of effects.  The Chromosaturation environments are tougher, but they come off in the catalogue as colourful geometric abstractions that one would like to, and could actually, enter. 

This catalogue is perhaps best fitted for the great and varied middle range of humanities students and graduates.  Yet like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which advertises itself as ‘a place for all people’, this is in many ways a book for all people.  Its profusion of colourful illustrations and highly interesting conversations between Mari Carmen Ramírez and the artist, especially those regarding his early years and inspirations, will appeal to virtually anyone seeking new artistic insights.  Cruz-Diez recalls with great feeling, for instance, the play of sunlight shining through the coloured windowpanes in his boyhood home.  He recreates, too, the sensation of sunlight streaming through the bottles of red cola at his father’s soft drink factory, ‘casting colored shadows on the floor and infusing the space with color’.  Another feature that should appeal to all is the heavily illustrated 80-page chronology, which even includes drawings by the budding seven-year-old artist.

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time byMari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea (eds) is published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Cruz-Diez Foundation, Houston, and distributed by Yale University Press, 2011. 512  pp., 450 colour illus. ISBN 978-0-300-16994-2